It would be great if customers woke up in the morning with the express purpose of buying your product or service. Unfortunately, the path a customer takes to your front door may be a little less direct. Think of this as the customer pinball game. Here’s how it works, with lots of breaks in between […]

With the majority of customers now on Facebook, the desirability of using Facebook to help market your business seems like an easy decision. But before cranking up your Facebook marketing, give some careful thought to these reasons why a Facebook business page can actually turn away your customers. Using Too Seldom – If customers visit your […]

For most of the years since its invention in 1886, the printed yellow pages have been a fixture beside household phones. But starting about 10 years ago, things began to change. Instead of turning to the printed yellow pages, customers began going online instead. Neighborhood businesses, across the board, are feeling this decline in yellow […]

As the economy has slowed down, “deals” or aggressive price promotions have become a proven way to get new and repeat business. However, price promotion can be very expensive when you total the costs of the advertising and the lost revenue that went into the promotion. For deals to be successful, a business must see […]

Google is always working to improve the search results for a given query. As of last count, Google uses over 200 factors to come up with the right results. The most popular of these is known as PageRank or the number of incoming links. Yet, PageRank is just one of 200. And, to make matters […]

The link in this article references the 200 million blog post milestone celebrated at WordPress.com. That is a lot of blog posts. More importantly it is a lot of blog posts for customers to search through trying to find your blog posts. That is why where you put your blog is more important that what […]

When planning your marketing strategy, it helps to have a primary goal that you want to accomplish. For most businesses this primary goal is typically “more customers”. However, this may be a misdirected or incomplete strategy. For example, some customers: Spend more than others Are easier to service Generate more repeat business Generate more referrals […]

HubSpot, a web marketing firm, recently completed a survey of their 2,500 business customers and compiled the results into some very interesting graphs and reports. The one that struck my attention was the one below: Clearly, they found a correlation between frequency of blog posts and new customers. But I think there are some other factors […]

Location is becoming an increasingly important part of the way Google searches. For anyone looking for a restaurant, automotive service, dry cleaning, dentistry or any other product or service delivered in the neighborhood, location is vital to find the right information. Recently, Google added the ability to refine searches with the “Nearby” tool in the […]

Each of our communities feature one or more newsletters that contain highly relevant local content. Behind the scenes there is a some smart setup combined with great deal of automation that assembles the articles and then delivers the newsletters (which we also call feedletters) to our website and via email to neighborhood readers. The following […]